Mapping the Basra and Baghdad chapters of Seyahatname-i Hudud
About the Source:
Seyahatname-i Hudud was written by Mehmed Hurşid Paşa, a scribe in the Ottoman survey commission of 1848-1852, which was appointed to resolve disputes between the Ottoman and Qajar Empires regarding border issues.1 Most information covered in the book is based on Mehmed Hurşid’s observations and field notes during his trips along the Ottoman-Qajar borderland, which was published later under the title of Seyahatname-i Hudud in 1861. The Seyahatname consists of chapters on the Ottoman provinces neighboring the Qajar Empire: 1) Basra, 2) Baghdad, 3) Shahrizor, 4) Mosul, 5) Van, and 6) Bâyezid. Mehmed Hurşid Paşa provides a detailed account of the geographic, demographic, cultural, and socio-economic structures of these regions in each chapter. What sets this account apart from contemporary Ottoman sources is the availability of detailed information on regions like Southern Iraq, Western Iran, and the Gulf, about which it was previously believed that the Ottoman Empire had very limited knowledge before the late 19th century.2
How to explore this map:
Click on the points to discover all the locations mentioned in the Baghdad and Basra chapters of the Seyahatname. Place names extracted from the Baghdad chapter are shown in purple and the Basra chapter with yellow dots.
Geolocation:
The Baghdad and Basra chapters of the Seyahatname were annotated in Recogito. We collected the bulk of geographical coordinates from Geonames. For the locations for which we could not locate a GeoNames ID, we benefited from sources like Wikipedia, Wikimapia, Vymaps, and Atlas Islamica.
Notes on data decisions:
In total, we annotated 2895 place names mentioned in these two chapters of the Seyahatname. Some place names are referred to more than once, so we included them in our dataset as well. For locations that were described as two different parts of the same town or village (e.g., Büyük Haykan and Küçük Haykan) but are mostly referred to as one today (e.g., Haykan), and have a valid GeoNames ID code, we chose to use the same code for both. There were place names (e.g., Şifahiye, today known as Ayn Tamr) that are known by different names today. We adhered to the names referred to in the Seyahatname for display on our map.
Further mapping:
We see some possibilities to further extend this map.
-
The Seyahatname lists a significant number of tribes with their population sizes, mainly in Iraq and Western Iran. This data could be visualized to represent tribal areas of influence both within Iraq and across the Ottoman-Qajar borderland.
-
The text also lists some agricultural lands on the Ottoman-Qajar border and Basra, with their current market values and yield capacities. This data could be visualized in a separate layer or map.
Unidentified locations:
Although we were able to locate 2368 place names mentioned in the Seyahatname, 527 place names could not be found and were labeled as ‘not found’ in our dataset. Among the majority of place names for which we could not find any information, those in the Kurdistan region constitute the majority. Additionally, we could not locate a significant number of waterways, channels, and ditches named in the Seyahatname.
Creator of this dataset: Mustafa Emre Gunaydi
Link to this dataset
License: Creative Commons 4.0 BY-NC-SA International
Suggested Citation: Gunaydi, Mustafa Emre. (2023). Mapping Seyahatname-i Hudud_Baghdad and Basra Chapters [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8356455
Last update: 16 February 2024
Footnotes:
-
Zekeriya Kurşun, “Mehmed Hurşid Paşa’nın Seyahatnâme-i Hudud Adlı Eserine Göre XIX. Yüzyıl Ortalarında Bayezid Sancağı,” Türk Kültürü İncelemeleri Dergisi 2 (2000): 101. Sabri Ateş, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 143-6. ↩
-
M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 6-18. Eugene L. Rogan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–15. ↩